New Year's Eve with the Doctor
by RavennaBlake
Summary: The 10th Doctor and Rose chase an unknown alien to Earth on New Year's Eve.
1. Landing

The TARDIS wheezed and moaned as it tried to land in the most unobtrusive spot on the busy street. New Year's Eve was in full swing and the uncharacteristic warm weather had led to a surge in party activity. Street parties, barbeques, spontaneous outdoor dances were all happening along with the usual club and bar scene they had materialised near. The Doctor hadn't meant to land on New Year's Eve, but chasing a mysterious alien through time streams was bound to land you in funny little places at funny little times. God only knows what the creature wanted with Earth on New Year's Eve in 2016.

"Rose!" The Doctor called, sweeping up his trench coat and double checking the scanner. He was definitely in the right place; traces of radiation were all over this city on this night. Keying the sonic into the radiation signature he barely paused to look up when a rumpled Rose dragged herself into the control room.

"What?" She asked with a yawn.

He looked her up and down and figured she wouldn't get carted off for being dressed in shorts and a T. She even had shoes on. "Come on, we've landed."

"Hold on." She said. "Where are we? What do I need to wear?"

"Earth, New Year's Eve, 2016. You look fine, come on or we'll lose it." He didn't wait for her to argue, lunging for the door and walking straight away from the TARDIS. He wasn't exactly sure which direction he was supposed to go in, but if he didn't look like he did Rose would be straight back to her room and he just didn't want to wait. This puzzle had been gnawing at him for days and not knowing what it was he was chasing was grating on him. All the readings he had been able to get off it kept ruling possibilities off the list, and he was growing very short on time-travelling species. Really short. As in he had completely ruled out everything he knew. It was fascinating. It was frustrating. It was…

Heading the other way.

Rolling his eyes, he pivoted and pushed through a crowd of tipsy party-goers who broke out in a storm of giggles and yells behind him. He could hear Rose apologise as she trotted to keep up and he spared her a quick smile as she caught up with him, still jogging to make pace with his longer strides.

"Hold on, do we know what it is yet?" She asked, obviously still trying to wake up.

"Nope." He replied, stopping abruptly to check the weird reading on the sonic.

"What it wants?" She tried.

"Not a clue."

"Where it is, exactly?"

"Somewhere in the city." He turned in a slow circle, before taking a few steps in one direction, pausing, and then pacing back. Finally he found the direction the signal was strongest and took off again.

"So what you're saying…" Rose huffed as she kept pace "is that I could've gotten dressed, maybe had something to eat while the TARDIS narrowed down the signal or whatever and we wouldn't be running around like idiots in the middle of a busy street."

He inwardly winced. She maybe, possibly had a point. But he was so close; he just couldn't wait around and twiddle his thumbs while this thing kept teasing him. "2016!" He deflected. "Brilliant year! Well, good." He tilted his head. "Ah, mediocre. Depends who you ask really. Donald Trump elected into Presidency, war still going on in the Middle East, Finding Dory released in cinemas… Live through 2016 and it's either the best or worst year of your life." He rolled his eyes at that. "Humans, you can't half be melodramatic."

"Whatever." Rose said. "You got a location or what?"

"It seems to be coming from…" He swivelled about and rushed through an alley and out onto another brightly-lit street. "Here!" He said triumphantly, sonic pointing at a sleek-looking club decked out in fairy lights with music and smoke oozing out onto the street. He was about to head straight up to the entrance when Rose stopped him.

"We can't just walk in there!" She hissed, arm gesturing at the long line of people dressed to the nines in clinging dresses and designer jeans. "And don't wave the psychic paper about either! There is no way there's an inspection going on during a New Year's Eve party, the caterers and staff'll all have a dress code and VIPs are going to be dressed up even more than that lot!"

"What do you suggest then?" The Doctor asked, eyes still searching the front of the building for any sign of odd alien activity.

"I _suggest_ we go back to the TARDIS and get dressed into something a bit less comfortable." Rose scrunched her nose up at her own getup. "Something I haven't just slept in either."

He ran a hand through his hair and tore his eyes away from the building long enough to look at her. "We don't have time, who knows what it's doing or where it's going to go next. We have no way of knowing that it's going to stay in there!"

"It's New Year's Eve!" Rose said back. "There's parties everywhere! Wherever it goes, we're going to need to blend in, and right now we're not blending in. Unless you want to spend the night in prison, we're going to need to back up the psychic paper with _something_."

"So go get dressed then." The Doctor said. "I'm going in, give me a buzz when you're ready and I'll come back for you, yeah?" He stormed over to the front of the waiting line, only feeling a little guilty for brushing Rose off when he looked back at her quickly, only to see her marching back in the direction of the TARDIS, all tense and out of sorts. Letting out a sharp breath, he pasted on a beaming smile and approached the bouncer, who looked like he could easily be part ogre.

The bouncer looked him up and down, clearly unimpressed and went to turn back to the line of people who were giving him equally unimpressed looks. "Uh, hello there." The Doctor said, flashing the psychic paper. "I believe I'm expected."

The bouncer's eyebrows rose and he gave the Doctor another assessing look. "Member are you? Must be new. Didn't get the email about the dress code and start time, did you?"

The Doctor put on a wince and shrugged apologetically. "System crashed a couple days ago, only got the confirmation text this afternoon. Wasn't going to show up but then plans got cancelled at the last minute, you know how it is." He didn't even really know what he was rambling on about, but the Bouncer had a semi-glazed expression that seemed to be working in his favour. "So, I just go in, yeah?"

The bouncer gestured to his friend, who rushed around to a section of red velvet rope and unhooked it. The Doctor strode forwards and just as he was about to push his way through the smoke into the dark club beyond, he ducked back and shook his head sharply. "Sorry, almost forgot. My friend, she's been a bit delayed – not great with plan changes – she's going to be a few minutes. Name's Rose Tyler, blonde, yea high." He gestured with his hand and then ducked back into the club before the Bouncer could refuse the unspoken order to let her through when he saw her.


	2. The Human Approach

Rose muttered under her breath as she shimmied her way into a deep blue dress that fell over her in drapes of silken fabric. She hadn't had time to take a proper look at what the main fashion was, but it seemed like it would fit in just about anywhere, which was exactly what she was going for. Low cut enough to draw some eyes, curve-hugging enough to keep them there, short enough to move freely but long enough to keep from flashing her knickers if she happened to bend over. She wished she had been able to find something similar with straps, but she was in a bit of a time crunch and she would just have to deal with the urge to yank the top of her dress up on a constant basis.

Rose slipped into a pair of ridiculously high heels the same shade as the dress, roughly pulled her hair back in a messy up-do, slapped on as much makeup as three minutes would allow and grabbed at a small silver clutch with a long chain that she had found next to a whole heap of other assorted bags in the TARDIS wardrobe. In the tiny clutch she managed to fit her wallet (with some spare psychic paper), some money coughed up by the TARDIS, her phone, a torch and a few other bits and pieces she scooped up in her mad dash around the TARDIS, all of which shouldn't have fit in anything nearly that small. She spared a moment to blow a kiss to the TARDIS in thanks before she trotted back out into the night, the TARDIS key she always kept on her bouncing against her neck from its place of honour as a pendant on a silver and blue choker. On any other night, she might had spared a few minutes worrying about whether the Doctor would like her outfit, whether he would give her that big goofy grin of his when he saw her. Tonight she just worried she wouldn't get the chance to slap him upside the head for running off on her.

Approaching the front of the club she paused, wondering whether it wouldn't just be better for her to wait near the TARDIS or try and sneak round the back. She didn't know if the Doctor was still in the club and she knew just how unlikely it was that he was going to hear his phone – if he had it on him – above all that racket. Straightening her shoulders, Rose figured she might as well try getting in anyway. So what if he had left already? She could pick up the trail; maybe find something that he had overlooked. She wasn't useless.

Walking up to the bouncer, Rose tried not to think too hard about her mates and the times they had all gone out dancing. She missed them sometimes, even felt bad for taking off on them, but she couldn't say she would do things differently. Maybe say goodbye more often, or give them a ring every now and then. The bouncer looked at her questioningly and Rose smiled, clearing her head. She stretched out her hand. "Rose Tyler." She had learned that introducing herself confidently could sometimes open doors without having to pull any other tricks.

"You with the guy in the pinstripes and duster?" The bouncer asked.

Like now. "Yep, that sounds like him."

The bouncer stared at her uneasily before gesturing to someone just beyond the open door. "Go on in." He said, as his friend pulled back some rope for her.

"Thanks." She beamed, adjusting the strap of her clutch and strutting as carefully as she could across the slightly uneven folds of carpet lolling out onto the sidewalk.

"Tell your friend that we're not in the habit of letting people just walk in on big event days." The bouncer said, frowning as someone started causing a fuss near the front of the line.

"I will." Rose promised as sincerely as she could. The Doctor just barging in places was the least of the topics they were going to discuss once she found him again.

Before Rose had started travelling through time and space, she might have thought she had stepped into another world as she crossed the threshold into the club. The air at once became oppressive, weighed down with heat, sound, sweat and the distinctive tang of artificial smoke from the fog machines scattered about the place. The pounding bass notes thrummed through her chest, making her feel off-kilter as she scanned the dim room splashed in reds and blues from the coloured spotlights hoisted out of sight. The thronging crowd in the middle of the room seemed to heave and pulse as if it were one gigantic creature instead of about a hundred individual humans and the intermittent strobing seemed to shatter time into a rolling series of snapshots.

Shaking off her immediate feeling of displacement Rose fought her way over to the bar, claiming the first spot available at the wave-like counter. She absently ordered a drink and went back to scanning the room, looking hard for anything that might be out of place. The music was slightly different than what she was used to listening to, but she didn't pay too much attention to it, focusing on people instead. With no idea of what they had been chasing, what it might look like or be after, Rose could only rely on her instincts as to what might be abnormal. A good portion of people dancing looked out of it, but it was New Year's Eve at a club. There were people darting around the edge of the room, but they looked like the typical wallflowers, designated drivers, resting dancers and, wait, was that a drug dealer? Rose shook her head. She toyed with her drink as she glanced at the bar staff. They all looked busy but professional. So far she couldn't see anything out of place, not even someone in a suit and converse runners.

She could see an upstairs section for what looked like VIPs; that was her next stop. Surrendering her seat to one of the four-person-thick crowd waiting at the bar she skirted around the edge of the room, keeping to the walls to try and avoid racking up some bruises from the over-enthusiastic crowd. The stairs were next to a narrow hallway that led into darkness, pierced only by slightly flickering neon signs that advertised bathrooms. Deciding that would be the last place she would have a look around Rose climbed the stairs, already hating that she couldn't just wear sneakers into a club as her feet started to ache.

The noise muffled a bit as she climbed, the stairs and the plush padding of both lush carpets and cushioned booths creating a small well of tolerable music levels for the high-rollers. Rose tried her best to be inconspicuous, strolling slowly past each booth and listening carefully to the conversations inside. The first two booths seemed to have a single group spread amongst it, and everyone was loudly crowing about how wasted they were getting and how awesome the rest of the night was going to be. Rose smiled at the antics of one of the party-goers who was trying – and failing – to make her way up onto the sleek black table in the middle of the booth. Shaking her head, she kept walking, deciding that the next booth of people making out wasn't what she was looking for and the one after that with two guys feeling up their shared date probably wasn't going to get her the answers she was after either.

The last booth held four people hunched over in what looked like serious discussion and Rose's curiosity pinged like crazy when she spotted the suspicious looks one of the party was darting about the room. She made her way over to the railing of the balcony, trying to hear anything of their conversation over the howling and thudding music. The hushed conversation was almost impossible to make out, but she thought she could catch snippets, something like "surprise" and "everything set in place" and "vital for it to work" which yeah, there could probably be a perfectly reasonable explanation for, but Rose had been yanked out of bed by a time-travelling alien chasing an unknown creature into a busy club. She figured a little more eavesdropping wouldn't hurt.


	3. Faery Tale

The Doctor was pressed up against a grungy alley wall, hands held up in a near-universal symbol of surrender as he stared wide-eyed at a creature that made even _his_ brain hurt. The being was tall, well over six feet – more like seven. It was plated with what looked like a steel exoskeleton, rugged spikes layering over one another to protect what had to be more vulnerable flesh underneath. The glimpses he got of that flesh were hard to look at. What looked like galaxies swirled, ebbed and flowed through the flesh, giving the illusion that the creature was some hole in reality itself, a window to vast places unknown. Trying to look past the effect was impossible and gazing into what had to be the being's eyes gave the Doctor a feeling of being swallowed into the universe itself, a feeling he hadn't come across since he was forced to look into the untempered schism as a child.

He finally had an idea of what it was he had been chasing, and he knew now that it had been a very, very bad idea to leave the safety of the TARDIS. The creature looming over him was dangerous, and not just in the regular old lock-you-up-and-take-over-the-world way either. This kind of danger went beyond Slitheen or werewolves or even Daleks. This creature was a force of nature, one of the immutable elements of the universe. Like the reapers it existed for a purpose, and that was to fix something that had been fundamentally broken.

The creature studied him, tilting its big, spiked head before slowly retreating, its stunted muzzle scanning the alley for a particular scent or trace. The Doctor let out a slow sigh of relief, but didn't dare move until the creature had retreated further down the alley, and even then moving slowly and carefully so as not to grab its attention. The part of him that had actually listened to his lessons as a child about the Nameless told him to find Rose and get the hell away from the city before they could be ripped apart and completely unmade by the creature he had encountered. The part of him that remembered that he was the only Time Lord left reminded him that whatever the creature was looking for was something he was duty-bound to investigate, no matter the cost. Flinging open the back door to the club he debated with himself, ruffling his already-mussed hair before the stubborn curiosity-driven, duty-bound part of him won out. With a groan he pushed back into the building, determined to at least find Rose before setting off to figure out just what kind of horror could possibly draw a Nameless down onto 21st century Earth.


End file.
